A thorny performance issue gets reported during this IT shop's morning briefing on problems encountered in the past 24 hours, according to a pilot fish sitting in on the meeting.

"It seems that a key application had been migrated from a rickety old Unix server to a sparkling new Linux box," fish says.

"A nightly batch process that feeds those results to the legacy mainframe systems went from taking more than three hours to running in 30 minutes. This was causing a backlog on the mainframe application.

"The IT operations group issued a problem ticket to have the application team slow the feed down.

"I could barely contain my laughter."

Only one thing can slow Sharky down: not enough true tales of IT life.So send me your stories at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll get a stylish Shark shirt every time I use one. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

Get your daily dose of out-takes from the IT Theater of the Absurd delivered directly to your Inbox. Subscribe now to the Daily Shark Newsletter.